Sensing envelopes : urban envelopes in the smart city ontology framework

Žižek, Andrej (author), Šenk, Peter (author), Pogačar, Kaja (author)

The paper examines the phenomenon of urban envelopes, a conceptual parallel to building envelopes, which is considered an emerging theme in studies of the built environment. The term ‘envelope’ refers to various physical and non-physical occurrences in the built environ- ment that delimit, enclose, or demarcate spatial configurations. In the first part of the paper, six distinct types of urban envelopes are identified: physical, programmatic, technological, ecological, environmental, and representational. These are defined based on a systematic literature review to clarify their form, role, and meaning in the context of contemporary cities. All six urban envelope types are formalised using ontology-building methods in Pro- tégé and visualised through WebVOWL, producing domain-agnostic RDF/OWL models that support semantic interoperability. The results provide a concise definition of urban envelopes, which are becoming increasingly relevant in their non-physical representations, such as spaces of control (surveillance of public urban spaces), dynamic environmental and ecological phenomena (pollution, heat islands, and more), temporal or dynamic definitions of space use, and many others in the context of contemporary smart city development. The analysis of possible alignment with existing smart city-related ontologies is presented. By providing the methodology for linking urbanistic principles with data-driven smart city frameworks, the paper provides a unified methodological foundation for incorporating such emerging spatial phenomena into formal urban models.

• Language: English
• Keywords: urban envelopes, building envelopes, urbanism, smart cities, ontology
• Work type: Article
• Typology: 1.01 - Original Scientific Article
• Organization: FA - Faculty of Architecture
• Publication status: Published
• Publication version: Version of Record
• Year: 2026
• Number of pages: 23 str.
• Numbering: Vol. 15, iss. 1, [article no.] 30
• PID: 20.500.12556/RUL-177964
• UDC: 711.4:502.131.1
• ISSN on article: 2220-9964
• DOI: 10.3390/ijgi15010030
• COBISS.SI-ID: 264582915
• Publication date in RUL: 14.01.2026

Record is a part of a journal

• Title: ISPRS international journal of geo-information
• Shortened title: ISPRS int. j. geo-inf.
• Publisher: MDPI
• ISSN: 2220-9964
• COBISS.SI-ID: 18678550

Licences

• License: CC BY 4.0, Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
• Link: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Description: This is the standard Creative Commons license that gives others maximum freedom to do what they want with the work as long as they credit the author.

Secondary language

• Language: Slovenian
• Keywords: urbane ovojnice, stavbni ovoji, urbanizem, pametna mesta, ontologije

Projects

• Funder: ARIS - Slovenian Research and Innovation Agency
• Project number: P5-0068
• Name: Trajnostno oblikovanje kvalitetnega bivalnega okolja